🎆 Ring in the New Year with a hands-on calculus activity! 🎆

Introduce your students to the concept of optimization in a fun, tactile way using New Year’s confetti boxes. In this activity, students will cut, fold, and compare paper prisms to discover how to maximize volume—making the abstract concept of optimization concrete, festive, and memorable.

How it works:

• Break students into groups and provide each group with:
  • New Year’s Optimization – Introduction Sheet
  • New Year’s Optimization – Lab Sheet
  • One of the 10 Prism Cut-Out Templates

• Groups build their prisms, then tape them to the board for easy side-by-side comparison.
• As a class, make predictions about which prism will hold the most confetti.
• Students work through the optimization problem using the Lab Sheet (or independently for advanced learners).
• Wrap up with a whole-class discussion to compare conjectures with the mathematically optimal solution.
• Optional: Have students decorate their confetti boxes to display as a reminder of optimization concepts! 🎉

What’s Included:

• 10 Prism Cut-Out Templates for group comparison
• Student Introduction and Lab Sheets
• Full Teacher Lesson Plan & Implementation Guide
• Complete Answer Key

AP Calculus Alignment:

• Unit 5.10 – Optimization
• Unit 5.11 – Solving Optimization Problems in Context

This activity is the perfect way to start the new year with energy, creativity, and solid calculus practice. Students will see the power of optimization while building, guessing, testing, and celebrating their learning. 🥳📦✨